Chatbots.org Business News

Experience a foreign or distant world without actually being there: Japanese researchers leaded by professor Susumu Tachi at Tachi Laboratory have developed Telesar V Robot Avatar which delivers a remote experience straight to its operator by transmitting sight, sound and touch data. You can actually feel the shape and surface unevenness, and also the temperature of objects.

Avatars can change our mindset according to recent research by Jeremy Bailenson, co-author of the book Infinite Reality. For example, when people view themselves digitally aged by decades, they are more likely to increase their contributions to retirement accounts. What if your avatar were to virtually gain weight? Most likely you would hit the gym straight away.

Have you ever dreamed of discussing the history of radioactivity with Marie Curie in person? It became possible. Museums, galleries and science centers plan to engage visitors in their exhibits by bringing intelligent avatars which represent historic figures, contemporary personalities or fictional characters.

Blue Mars is a 3D virtual world platform enabling users to meet, chat and share their common digital experiences. Blue Mars Lite application goes one step further: Meet other avatars in real-world locations on Google Street View.

What happens when two chatbots chat? Researchers from
Cornell Creative Machines Lab headed by Professor Hod Lipson at Cornell University have recently submitted this entertaining idea to this year’s Loebner Prize Competition in Artificial Intelligence. Objective of this competition is to fool 2 or more judges into thinking that a chatbot is a human being.

You’re walking down the street and passing by a multiservice kiosk. Would you like a virtual guide to be at your service? This video demonstrates how it could look like - watch it and check for yourself if it’s worth using.

Beginning from Friday, 6th May 2011, Warsaw hosts eight edition of a documentary film festival named Planete Doc Film Festival. I participate in it intensively - I bought tickets for 10 movies! On Saturday I have seen the movie: Life 2.0., and I am very impressed by this film and its story. It is about people that live their everyday life into a virtual online world Second Life.

Research shows that chatbots stimulate a positive state of mind among their users. As a result users enjoy more pleasure in performing their activities and spend more time on performing them. According to ‘social response theory’, the ‘social cues’ send by chatbots increase the users’ involvement in interacting with a computer. As a consequence chatbots contribute to a more personal perception of the online experience.

What is the perfect term for those seemingly intelligent ‘things’, which are popping up everywhere, and which feel more ‘natural’ as time goes by?

Well, we have found 161 synonyms (161!!! No typo!!).

As the leading business and research community in humanlike conversational artificial intelligence, we hope to increase understanding of this field, to provoke discussion and to initiate discussion on standardization of this huge list of different terms, some of them with slightly different implications but mostly genuine synonyms.

We are introducing the most popular, excellent candidate terms to be adopted by the industry and those synonyms which are really eye catching or controversial, and we will just list the remaining synonyms.

Analyst Firm Gartner predicts that “by year-end 2013, at least 15 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will use a virtual assistant to serve up Web self-service content to enhance their CRM offerings and service delivery”. Chatbots.org agrees with the upcoming industry growth, especially since it matches their earlier market estimates for 2015 defined back in 2004, but has some criticism as well, especially on the vendor criteria and lack of identifying challenges within the industry.